Who talks in riddles, who talks in reasons?

We can has website!



I'd planned to chill out a bit after Glastonbury, but then Denny and I decided to take over the world, so this had to happen. I'm pretty damn pleased with it. And who knows, it might even help us find clients! Because more work, yes, that is exactly what I need. ;)

And now, I sleep.

... Actually I help bard move house and go to a celebratory TG with the denny. That's almost the same thing though? Right?

Police State UK.

This is what Denny and I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. It's still a bit buggy, and we haven't fixed the theme in IE 6 or for the subpages yet, but it's functional. Readers, commenters, and contributors are very much welcomed. Please, if you care about civil liberties and human rights in the UK, have a look and pass on the link.

There's an RSS Feed here; feel free to syndicate it. DW feed is police_state_uk_feed.

Thanks.

I've ordered flyers! 100 of them! They should be arriving in two weeks, and they will be AMAZING.

I went with the first design in the end (I'd have used two, but it would have cost twice as much and I'm tight-fisted like that). What I didn't anticipate was having to redo the image from scratch in order to get it to a size and resolution the printers would accept. The eventual image has completely different proportions from the original design (it's relatively about half again as long) and was about three times larger, which was too big an increase to just size it up. Anyway, it's done now. Here's an ensmallened version of the final print image:

( large images beneath )

In other K~nesis-related news:

- I have a binbag containing 10 identical pale heads in my kitchen. No, I have not in fact decapitated decaplets, although I think that that would be an awesome name for the artwork when it's finished. And no, I'm not looking forward to having to explain this when I take them through Paddington station this evening.

- The head shop was unexpectedly closed on Saturday, so Kristen and I ended up casting about desperately looking for things to cover with paint. Our initial plan to make plaster casts of the roots of trees sort of faltered before we even started (my neighbours were watching, the plaster was the wrong sort, and we couldn't find any suitable trees). We were at a loss until I realised that I had some bits of mdf in the downstairs loo which I'd obtained from Freecycle to board up the old catflap with, and which I'd kept for painting on at some point. The pieces of mdf are thick, curved squares (what's the technical name for a square with curved corners?) and they take paint BEAUTIFULLY. We undercoated them first in white gesso, then did a background layer of acrylics before swapping to oils for the details. Unlike the texture of canvas, the wood grain is perfectly smooth, and the colours came out amazingly brightly, with a polished finish.

We didn't finish any of the paintings, but all of them are another step on from our previous collaborations. The themes of the day were tropical flowers, excessively bright colour, dragons. One painting started out trying to be an extreme close-up of sunlight filtering through the red petals of a passionflower, with dark waving stamen in the foreground and the perfect filigree of veins on the coloured petals. It went through a tentacles-and-hellfire phase, and is now resting between firelight and tropical blooms. Another started out as a bird of paradise, and quickly became a dragon in flight, although it might be a hummingbird pretending to be a dragon. The third (on canvas) is just bright, bright petals and leaves in electric blues and oranges and greens, sharp focus foreground and fingerpainted blurs in the background, leaflight and moisture. It's simple and complex and beautiful. I don't think these paintings are really trying to say anything. Apart, perhaps, from pure joy in colour and life and sunlight. They are a dance, a riot, of colour. Ever since Kristen left I have been itching to return to them, become immersed in that radiant, sensory world.

- Tomorrow, we work on heads. This will involve me giving Kristen head. I don't think I'm going to tire of this joke, EVER.

cuteevilpixie's and my exhibition is now on Facebook, which means it must be real. 21 confirmed guests so far! 27 might show up! I <3 Facebook. Thankyou so much to everyone who's planning to attend, and to dennyd for helping with the promotion. (This being the man who has just said to me, and I quote, "I wonder what the capacity of the venue is. Breaking that would be cool.")

Kilinrax is confirmed as being in charge of the music for the launch party on the 22nd (although due to licensing laws we can't advertise him as a DJ). This is EXCELLENT news, and he too deserves many thanks, for giving up his time to make our exhibition way cooler than it would have been otherwise. Also many drinks. He deserves to be bought lots of drinks.

I has been making FLYERS.


(click to view full size)

Now, apart from the wanky-but-sadly-necessary art blurb, I'm pretty happy with this. It's based on a combination of images including the Perfect Storm nebula, the ant nebula, and The Dryad's Dream. I love the whole burnt gold summer colour palette: sunlight through leaves; forest; flame; sunburst; clouds boiling into space.

Denny, on the other hand, thought it was too brown. "You should do a more blue-toned one for the geeks among us," he said. "Based on Polarity or something." At which point I started FLAILING, because firstly, dude, it's not BROWN. And secondly, this image PERFECTLY ENCAPSULATES the synthesis of immediate and infinite natural environment which is present in the art we've done so far, and we're going to be focussing much more on that juxtaposition of microscopic and macroscopic (molecules, nebulae, fractals, extreme close-ups of foliage and elements) as we develop this exhibition. There'll be a lot of galaxies and stars and universes, but also rainforests, the northern lights, the human form. It's going to be lush and organic and the colours will be intense. And I don't know how I could express that juxtaposition using just the Polarity image (without mentioning the fact that painting is still unfinished, and therefore I'm not keen on using it in a flyer) or just a space-based image. A fractal image would be perfect, but we don't have any fractal paintings yet, and it's a bit daft to have a flyer that doesn't include any of our art.

Anyway, I don't want people to look at our flyer and go "ICK BROWN" so I made some differently coloured versions.


(click to enlarge)

The last one is pretty, but it's kind of wintry, you know? And what we're doing is definitely summer art.

So, tell me what you think? And I'll doubtless be making more flyers as we produce more artworks. (Which will hopefully start happening TODAY, as Kristen is in town!) I mean, the whole nature of this exhibition is that the artwork is improvised and it's sort of essential that we can't entirely predict what we'll end up with. We have inspiration, but that provides a starting-point rather than a goal-post. So it's sort of inevitable that the promotional materials are going to evolve with the collection. I mean, if we could describe the entire exhibition in advance, it wouldn't be very experimental, would it?

By the way, I'm probably not going to be posting collaborative artwork online from now on. We have to give you some incentive to come to the exhibition, after all. I shall restrict myself to blurry cameraphone photos and tantalising prose descriptions. BWA HA HA.